When Warframe’s Techrot Encore update comes out on March 19, a nasty new infestation strain will threaten the innocent people of Hollvania.
Warframe 1999, the game’s current storyline, traps the protagonists in a dirty, grungy and grimy time loop, battling throughout the streets of a doomed city-state. The status quo doesn’t seem like it’s going to change anytime soon, leaving players in a dismal but determined state.
The game’s narrative has become increasingly serious (and bleak) since The New War update shipped in 2021, bringing Warframe’s main factions to the brink of destruction. Recent content packages have continued this trend, as players have largely floundered in the face of a new eldritch threat: the Man in the Wall.
The game’s creative director, Rebecca Ford, says that for a while now, she’s “had the idea of doing something a little more lighthearted if it fits the tone” of Warframe. Finding the right balance between seriousness and levity is a constant goal for Digital Extremes, the studio behind Warframe, as Ford explained.
During Ford’s tenure as creative director, a brand-new storyline has dabbled in darker topics than ever before. Faustian deals are being struck behind the curtain, and newer characters, like Loid and the Hex protoframes, have been trapped in their own forms of heartbroken stasis for years on end.
There are gaps in the miasma of misery, where players bring genuine connection and camaraderie back into the lives of their latest allies. The wounds they’ve suffered will heal in time, and that helps drive forward the more intimate, interpersonal stories.
Still, Warframe doesn’t let you forget that the characters enmeshed in its story are broken by horror and trauma. Warframe has evolved over the course of more than a decade, and now the kid gloves have come off. Despite introducing zany new concepts like talking animals, cyborg romance and a living guitar, Warframe’s current story arc continues to delve into the dark.
The war of the altered past is bleak, but it still has its quirky joys
The Technocyte Coda aren’t a happy bunch, but they provide a brief tonal reprieve for players.
The Hollvania time loop is a nasty place. Martial law is in effect and there’s blood in the streets. The Scaldra, a military junta of religious fanatics, has taken total control of the government, but they’re still losing ground to the Techrot menace.
Before the Tenno arrived, the threat of total nuclear annihilation loomed large over the city-state. Player intervention is the only thing saving new allies from atomic fire, which is the only real “win” in the fight.
As a counterbalance to those dire stakes, the characters that players interact with throughout Warframe 1999 are quirky, funny and very human. Amir and Aoi quickly became fan favorite protoframes with their puppy dog energy and bubbly personalities, while characters like Quincy and Lettie are quietly hiding hearts of gold.
The Techrot Encore update might raise the stakes for the fight in Hollvania, but the main pillar of the content package will still provide some much-needed levity in this anachronistic plotline. Players will come to blows with new infested adversaries, but they’ll be able to have a laugh at the same time.
The members of the Technocyte Coda are menacing, but they also have big, vibrant, wacky personalities and behaviors. On top of making these foes more threateningly bizarre, Ford used them as an opportunity to weave the altered-history setting into those strange beings.
“For these ones, we were able to take the boy band members they were based on, and these are basically a foul attempt to re-create these personalities,” Ford said. “They do it through the archives of 1999-era internet. So each character, when you’re hearing them talk and taunting you, it’s presented through clips of MTV or radio interviews.”
This kind of cultural necromancy fits the balance between seriousness and levity: in the game’s universe, there were real boy band members of a group called On-lyne in the past, but when players created Techrot malware, it attempted to re-create the musicians out of infested flesh. The story you’ll experience can be partially told through enemies, Ford said.
“You will be able to know exactly what On-lyne was about by the time you’ve played against all five of the Coda adversaries,” Ford said.
Could ‘story Nightwave’ make a return?
Nora Night is the point of contact for any player engaging with the current Nightwave act.
Warframe’s Nightwave system is a free battle pass that allows players to earn Warframe and weapon slots, arcane enhancements, special arsenal upgrades and unique cosmetics as they complete daily and weekly challenges. Ultimately, it’s a generous reward system to ensure that players who’ve finished the bulk of the current content cycle have a reason to keep coming back to the fight.
Each Nightwave battle pass is themed around current content. The previous Nightwave battle pass featured a summonable Stalker ally and Stalker-themed Operator cosmetics to coincide with the Belly of the Beast story arc, while the current Nightwave battle pass includes Warframe 1999 cosmetics.
But the current iteration of Nightwave looks very different from its original conception. Nightwave started as a form of episodic content that explored narrative elements of Warframe’s world that didn’t quite fit into planned major content updates.
As each Nightwave chapter developed, new minibosses related to the plotline would start to raid missions and railroad the objective. Warframe’s world felt more alive, which is a very important feeling for a massively multiplayer online game to evoke. There were more neutral parties looking out for their own interests — which just so happened to come into conflict with your own.
Some of Warframe’s best world-building was delivered through story Nightwave episodes. Through them, players learned of the Grineer prisoner escapee, the Wolf of Saturn Six, and how his quest for vengeance shackled him again; players discovered the false prophet Arlo, and how his healing techniques secretly spread the infestation; and players met the glassmaker Nihil, and explored his serial killings linked to an ancient empire.
When the Wolf escaped the Saturn Six supermax prison, I felt like I was being stalked during my Warframe missions.
In recent years, Nightwave has dropped the episodic narratives it used to build in order to serve up complimentary content for bigger main story updates like Warframe 1999.
“We definitely changed what Nightwave was when we realized it was unsustainable for us to balance doing updates and Nightwave,” said Ford. “We have to decide what we really liked about them, what the community liked about them and what was fun for us.”
The reception of the current iteration of Nightwave has remained positive, according to Ford, and development resources are still largely allocated to major Warframe update packages.
That doesn’t mean that a return to story-based Nightwave is impossible. Whether that looks like revisiting the concept later or bringing back events from one of the previous story-based Nightwave battle passes depends on how it impacts the game.
“Sometimes you really can just turn on a switch and rerun one and hope it doesn’t break anything,” said Ford.
The potential return of narrative-based Nightwave episodes could be the way to deploy new lighthearted stories from the wider Warframe world. The Origin System is massive, and we’ve been shown that not all of it is completely miserable.
“These are decisions that really come down to resources and time,” said Ford. “We could do a lighthearted Nightwave. Maybe that’s the key. Maybe the secret here is to make a joke Nightwave.”
When the future of the Origin System can seem so hopeless, what are we fighting for?
Helping out common folk, like the workers in Fortuna, makes Warframe’s universe feel a little less hostile.
Over the 12 years that Warframe players have been running amok across Corpus research base and Grineer galleons, the protagonists have moved the needle very little when it comes to destroying these oppressors throughout the galaxy.
Though the Origin System is absolutely massive, the granular focus on helping out specific groups of characters, like the humble farmers in Cetus, the indentured workers in Fortuna or the Hex protoframes in 1999, lets players connect to the world on a personal level, clinching small wins that make the constant struggle feel worthwhile.
“Our narrative always needs to be about a character” and how they impact the wider universe, said Ford. “There are interesting things to be said about mass war and conflict and science fiction, but knowing who cares about what needs to be at all times observed.”
Major players like Parvos Granum, the founder of the Corpus, occasionally slip into the background as Warframe’s story plays out. But their schemes are always in motion behind the scenes.
The focus on individuals and their personal desires has always been important to the Warframe story. The previous main villain was an ego-driven narcissist from many millennia ago, who aimed to bend an ex-lover to his control no matter the cost. But the constant tug-of-war feels bleaker now that the designated big bad is an as-yet untouchable cosmic threat.
In a meta way, the bleakness is reflected in the one-person-army gameplay. You can cut through hundreds of thousands of enemies and never make a dent in this fight. The usual small wins and interpersonal connections that provide emotional catharsis stop cutting it when the stakes are so high.
The first time that this became apparent to Digital Extremes was when Warframe’s development team shipped the Whispers in the Wall update, according to Ford.
“Something that was really interesting with that update’s reception is that it was really quite severe and depressing,” she said.
Every new activity hub the game introduces comes with a cast of colorful new characters, and the Sanctum Anatomica was no different. “You had a talking fish and other talking animals in the Cavia,” said Ford. “But even then they were quite serious when they had to be.”
The Cavia provided brief moments of levity during the Whispers in the Wall expansion, but they struggled with their own pain and traumas as well.
For players sinking under the current arc’s bleakness, there’s occasional levity, like in the Dog Days event, but the question of whether to insert more comedic and lighthearted moments comes down to whether Warframe players would enjoy that. Ford’s own tastes veer toward games that mix serious plot beats with lighter moments, but she doesn’t want to conflate her own tastes with those of Warframe’s audience.
“Is there a place in Warframe — as a pretty advanced sci-fi game with a lot of characters now — where we could do some levity in a more interesting way?” Ford mused.
There are some plotlines and update ideas brewing behind the scenes that could provide those moments of levity, but the decision also boils down to how development resources are allocated at Digital Extremes.
The new Techrot Encore update, for instance, got a lot of extra attention and care put into it because of the positive reception to Warframe 1999. When the development team steps out of their comfort zone and tries something completely new, Ford needs to make a judgment call about how much time they’re going to commit to the idea.
Perhaps the most important example of levity in modern Warframe is the 1999 romance system, where players can settle down and develop a relationship with members of the Hex.
“In a game-as-a-service and how we operate, Warframe is only as good as our last update,” she said. “That’s how people view the games-as-a-service industry: Your game will always only be as good as the last update you put out.”
In a sense, it’s up to Warframe players and the feedback they provide to drive the direction of the game. Lighthearted narrative threads haven’t been ruled out of the game’s future, but it’s the fans that help Digital Extremes decide what stays and what goes as they plot out what to build from their development roadmap.
“Levity and a lighter tone, something a bit more adventurous or uplifting, we don’t have a lot of that,” said Ford. “But should we dedicate one update to that? Is that something more players would want in Warframe? A feel-good or a silly update? I’m really not sure.”
Warframe’s next major update — the Techrot Encore — will include boy bands and rockstars, but things will remain dead serious as players entrench themselves further into the fight going down in 1999. Though it’s entirely possible that the new sentient guitar will lighten the mood, we’ll only know for sure once the content comes out across all platforms on March 19.
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